Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-11-13-Speech-1-169"
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"en.20061113.20.1-169"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, Mr Mulder, we are, today, discussing the second pillar and rural economic development, something that this House, and – if one is to believe its own utterances – the Commission too, regard as important, and even the members of the Council, in their speeches, keep on emphasising that this is where the future of European agricultural policy lies, yet here we are, rejecting a proposal that is intended, to all outward appearance, to put several billions of euros aside for this purpose.
It is not easy to justify this rejection on the basis of the money involved, but the offer being made to us is an improper one. The powers that have caused it to be made are those who are responsible for rural development falling EUR 20 billion short of the budget proposal made by this House and the Commission; it is they who have forced through budget cuts come what may – not least to the detriment of this qualitative line – and are now saying: ‘OK, you can take 20 per cent out of the first pillar, and then use it to top up what we have taken away from you.’
That is what I call improper. These powers are no friends to European agriculture, or, indeed, to Europe’s rural areas; what they are seeking to do instead is to use the agriculture budget as a quarry in the same way as they are trying to do with many other policy areas, but what makes this so very deceitful is that it has the appearance of being a redistribution while not really being one, with the possibility of taking the money out without co-funding, so, in other words, the agriculture budget is, as a whole, more likely to lose something than have anything added to it.
This is in fact not the proposal that the committee made for medium-term financial planning, in which we said that co-funding in the first pillar too would have made it possible for funds to be made available for the second; we would in fact have been able to restrict the co-funding of the second pillar to 25%, thus enabling a better flow of funds, but all these proposals were cast to the winds, and now along they come with this figure of 20%. The only thing is, Commissioner, that this financial plan has been agreed to by the Commission, and also – and this I have to say with bitter regret – by this House, which has gone along with this extortion in order not to put the European Union’s financial future at risk.
Commissioner, that must not be allowed to hamper us, though, and I will ask you just what you propose to do in order that rural development is not starved of funding. What are we in this House to do? How are we, in our groups, to make it clear that rural development can have a future not only through the reallocation of funds, and that this whole budget line must develop its financial arrangements independently, in the same way as the other structural funds have done? It is to that question that I would like to have an answer from you, here and now, in order that the Commission, in our next negotiations on this subject, should show its colours more openly and that we, here in this House might perhaps stand up for ourselves a bit more."@en1
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